Where do you find stories?

Sometimes starting a story is the hardest part. Taking a story walk is a way that I've found helps as a story starter. First you take one student on a walk around your classroom or playground and stop every few feet, then begin a possible story about something that happened to you both regarding the first object you see. Take turns with different students until the process is fluid and imaginations are activated. Next assign a story walk for homework. It's an interesting way to engage students in their home environments beyond using electronics and television.

What is digital storytelling?

The entry into digital storytelling is not isolated to one genre. Even the examples included on this represent the entry as originating from a variety of digital story telling types such as: video poetry, e-portfolios, oral story telling and film stories.

Your Story - Your Identity Framed?

All we really have are stories. We tell them to describe or frame what happened, to position ourselves, to identify our character amongst the narratives of life. When we tell our stories, however, they swirl off into the other oceans of stories that surround them. It is difficult to frame your identity through a story because the temporal nature of stories leaves no one without a listened that affects the identity of the teller.

Consider for a minute, the Terry Fox story. This story has been around since the early 80s. Terry Fox's story was told by him in the media and the media told, retold his story. As he became a folk hero for disability, Terry's story and therefore his identity shifted through the telling and retelling. Can we ever frame our own identity through story? I think not.

Storytelling explodes with digital genre

There is not doubt that storytelling has taken on many new facets since it entered the age of social networking. Online centers for social networking have emerged into the public eye. Check out this interesting example at http://www.storycenter.org/

Your Story

Everyone's life is a story. Telling your story is both personally transformational and an exercise in preservation. If you were to tell the story of your life today in a poem that you left in your safety deposit box, on this blog, as a filmed interview, as a short story then relatives years from now would be able to read about you and be inspired by the life you led. It helps generations in the future to know from whom they came -- good experiences and bad. These all count.
Telling your story now can also be personally transformational. You reflect on your experience in order to tell the story. You reconstruct what happened and that will help you to think about the future. Your future story.
Example: My brother is a video buff and he decided to ask Mom and Dad about their life in an interview video. Now, both of our parents have passed away so those films are treasures in our family. We don't have the chance to ask them any more questions but we can look at this video and learn from it and we live the stories of our own lives.

"Everyone who got to where they are had to begin where they were." - Richard Paul Evans

DIGITAL STORY TELLERS NSAA (not so anonymous anymore)

Do you have a story to tell? What a wonderful way to share in a community of digital storytellers. Welcome!